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The Xfce 4.16 desktop environment has been officially released today as a major update that brings numerous new features and improvements over the previous release, Xfce 4.14.
Unlike Xfce 4.14, which was in development for more than four years, the Xfce 4.16 release only spent about a year and a half in the lab, but it promises great changes that fans of the lightweight desktop environment will definitely adore.
Highlights of Xfce 4.16 include a refreshed look with new icons and color palette, support for fractional scaling in the Display dialog, dark mode for the Panel, improved search and filter capabilities for the Settings Manager, support for client-side decorations for all the Settings dialogs, as well as a revamped About Xfce dialog that now shows basic system information.
The window manager received a performance boost too in Xfce 4.16, showing the Alt-Tab dialog only on the primary display and allowing users to zoom the cursor and keep minimized windows in the most recently used list.
The Thunar file manager has also been updated in this release and it now lets users pause copy and move operations, supports queued file transfers, supports transparency in GTK themes, and remembers the view settings per directory.
A new Status Tray plugin is available in the Panel Preferences dialog to make it easier configuring the system tray area and the status notifications, and a new Default Applications dialog was born from the merge of the “Mime Settings” and “Preferred Applications” dialogs.
Xfce 4.16 also comes with more default keyboard shortcuts, custom right-click actions for Desktop launchers, support for the Workspace Switcher plugin to display numbering for workspaces, improved gpg-agent (GNU Privacy Guard) support, as well as support for sorting apps by frequency and recency in the Appfinder.
Moreover, there’s bash auto-completion for xfconf-query, support for excluding paths in the tumbler.rc settings file, cleaner battery and ‘on power’ settings, autohide for the low-battery notification when connecting to a charger, and a new visual indicator in the Xfce Panel when “Presentation mode” is enabled.
Of course, there’s no new Xfce release without a new wallpaper, which you can see in the image above. The dependencies were also updated as GTK2 is no longer supported; GTK 3.22 or later is now required, along with GLib and GDBus 2.50 or later, and the LibGTop library.
Check out the official announcement and tour, as well as my first look article to see Xfce 4.16 in action. Meanwhile, keep an eye on the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution for the Xfce 4.16 desktop environment and update as soon as possible to enjoy the new features and enhancements.
Last updated 3 years ago
